Madman on a Drum (16 page)

“We ready?” Scottie asked.

I didn't hear an answer, but Scottie must have been satisfied.

“A deal's a deal,” he said. He took his arm away and pushed Victoria forward. “Get in the car,” he said. Victoria opened the door, slid in next to me, and closed the door. She still didn't speak.

“Buckle your seat belt, honey,” I told her.

She glared at me and shook her head as if she thought I were seriously deranged, but she buckled her belt.

“Okay,” said Scottie. “You can go.”

He put his gun in his pocket.

I started up the car, put it in gear.

“You're an asshole, Scottie,” I said and hit the accelerator. “I'll be seeing you real soon.” I glanced at him in the rearview as I sped down the street. From his body language, he looked like he had just been zapped with a Taser. I liked the look.

 

It bothered me that I didn't see any police vehicles as I maneuvered the Reliant through the Badlands and onto I-94.
Don't let them get away, don't let them get away,
my inner voice chanted.

Victoria stifled a sob next to me. It was the first sound she'd made since I found her.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She nodded.

“You're safe now,” I said. “You'll be home soon.”

“I expected Daddy to come and get me,” she said. Her voice was low, almost a whisper.

“Your father wanted to be here, sweetie. The kidnappers wouldn't let him. They were afraid of what he might have done.”

“They were afraid of Daddy?”

“Big-time.”

“Because they thought he might kill them?”

“Yep.”

“Would he have?”

“Once he knew you were safe? Yeah, there was a real good chance.”

“I'm glad, then, glad Daddy isn't here. I don't want them dead. I want them arrested so I can testify in court, so I can tell them that I wasn't afraid, tell them that they didn't make me afraid.”

She was crying now. I reached across the seat and rested my hand on her shoulder.

“I don't want to cry,” she said.

“It's okay, Tory. Cry all you want.”

She brushed my hand away. “I don't want to cry!” A moment later, she said, “I wasn't afraid.”

“I know.”

“I hate those fuckers.”

“I don't blame you.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence until we reached the block where Victoria lived.

“McKenzie,” Victoria said.

“Yes, sweetie.”

“Please don't tell Mom and Dad that I used the F-word.”

I had to grab Victoria's elbow to keep her from flying out of the car before it stopped. She already had the door open and her seat belt unfastened before I eased to the curb in front of her house. Shelby was standing at the front door. She started running the moment she saw us. Victoria sprinted to meet her. They had a splendid collision on the front lawn. Bobby and Katie were there a moment later to pile on. I stood next to the Reliant and watched, not even remotely embarrassed by how I looked until Honsa sidled up to me. He glanced down at the boxers and then up at me.

“Nice color,” he said. “Brings out your eyes.”

“You think?” I said.

Honsa was carrying the clothes I had left on the beach at McCarrons Lake. They were neatly folded.

“We thought you might want these,” he said.

“When I left the ransom drop, they were loading the money into the back of a red late-model Pontiac Vibe station wagon,” I said. “I didn't get a plate.” I recited the address of the yellow house. “They might have been using it. I can't be sure.”

“I'll alert Special Agent Wilson. The SWAT teams moved in just moments after your signal cleared the area. We haven't heard anything yet.”

I thanked him for his consideration and made my way into Shelby's Place, taking my time as I passed the joyous pile, wishing I had the right to join in. I went into the bathroom and dressed myself. The tape fixing the GPS transmitter to my leg was painful coming off, but I didn't mind. I gave it to the tech agent when I emerged from the house. “You guys were right,” I said. “It is waterproof.”

The Dunston clan was now in a small tight circle in the center of the front lawn. Victoria was talking hard and fast, telling her family what had happened to her, the words spilling out in a gush. Honsa was listening from a respectful distance. He came over when he saw me.

“Agent Wilson wants you to return to the scene,” he said. “Can you do that?”

“Sure.”

“Leave the Plymouth here for our forensics people.” He gestured at the tech agent. “We'll drive you.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Agent Wilson will explain.” Honsa smiled a smile entirely unlike the professional smile he had continuously flashed during the past few days. This one was filled with glee. “You did good, McKenzie,” he said.

“Yeah, how 'bout that?”

Honsa returned to the Dunstons to listen to Victoria's story; I had no doubt he would debrief her more formally later. I followed the tech agent across the lawn to his car. I caught Bobby Dunston's attention as I passed. He looked at me, just looked, his eyes filled with words he did not speak, that he didn't need to speak. He tilted his chin in a brief nod. I nodded back, and for a moment I felt like King Kong astride the Empire State Building, thinking I was the biggest thing there was. Until the planes came.

 

Scottie Thomforde was dead.

He was lying on his back on the sidewalk in front of the yellow house, the black ski mask clutched in his right hand. Someone had pumped a single round into his face and another into his chest. By the lack of blood on his white coveralls, I was willing to bet that he had died instantly. I said his name out loud.

“That's what his ID said,” Harry told me. “I just wanted to make it official.”

Shakespeare wrote that “the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones,” but I think he's wrong. Staring down at Scottie I didn't dwell on what he had done to Victoria and the Dunston family, or any of his other crimes. I remembered that he was a sure-handed shortstop with plenty of range; I remembered listening to him playing the drums at the mixer at Merriam Park, trying hard to be Ginger Baker or Keith Moon.

“I'm sorry he's dead,” I said.

“Me, too,” Harry said.

“No, you're sorry because he can't lead you to his partner. I'm sorry because it shouldn't have ended this way. He had been a good guy once. God! What is his mother going to think, I wonder? Damn, Scottie. Dammit.”

“This is bad. This is very, very bad.”

Harry was standing outside the ominous yellow tape surrounding the crime scene. He was leaning against a dark-colored van; his arms were folded, his chin resting against his chest. The street had been closed, and various law enforcement vehicles were parked every which way along it. A group of men milled about on the far side of the van talking to themselves. Others, most of them wearing windbreakers with the white letters
FBI
on the back, a few dressed in the uniforms of the St. Paul Police Department, were scattered up and down the street; a few were inside the yellow house. They were all probably searching for clues, but you couldn't have proven it by me.

The yellow tape was held up by the SPPD uniform who carried the attendance log noting the names of everyone who had visited the crime scene. I ducked under it and joined Harry at the van. “No sign of the money, I suppose,” I said.

“Nope.”

“How the hell did you let him get away, Harry? You had two SWAT teams in position, for chrissake.”

“We had to wait to make sure you were clear before we moved in. And now it looks like they knew we were coming.”

“Well, duh.”

“Look, McKenzie. We're going to get a lot of shit over this as it is. We don't need to hear it from you, too.”

“We? There's no we.” I pointed my finger at him. “I'm blaming you personally.”

I would have said more except for the expression on Harry's face. I have no compunction about kicking a man while his back is turned, but never when he's down. Still, it was my money!

I glanced up the street. The cars I had seen earlier were still parked where they had been, except for the big white moving truck. Agents were progressing from house to house, searching for witnesses, maybe hoping the kidnappers were still holed up in the area. From their expressions and the way they went about their business, I don't think anyone liked their chances.

“You might want to have your agents check the duplex down the street,” I told Harry. “There was a moving van parked in front of it before. Maybe the movers saw something—” Then it hit me. There were no movers, only the truck. “Oh, crap.”

“What?”

“There was a sixteen-foot moving van parked across the street, its doors open, the ramp down. A truck that size, I bet the interior is at least ninety inches wide and a hundred eighty inches long.”

“So?”

“The kidnappers loaded the money into the back of a Vibe. Did Honsa tell you?”

“Yes.”

“A Vibe is about seventy inches wide and one hundred seventy inches long.”

“Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

“I remember thinking at the time that it was a poor excuse for a getaway car—it's so small, such a weak engine. Only they didn't get away in the Vibe. I bet the kidnappers drove it into the back of the truck and got away in that.”

“Tell me you got a license plate.”

“No.”

“A name painted on the side of the truck?”

“I didn't notice.”

Harry went inside the van. While he was there, the FBI's forensic pathologist arrived, ducked under the yellow tape, and began examining the body. I turned my back to him. Harry exited the van and said, “Do you have anything else you'd like to share, McKenzie?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Look at the bright side. Victoria is safe and sound. Now we can conduct a proper investigation. We'll start by interviewing everyone you spoke to the day before yesterday. I'm convinced that one of them must have tipped off Scottie that we were looking for him and he subsequently told his partner. That's probably why the partner killed him, to protect himself.”

“Umm.”

Harry spun toward me. “Umm?” he said. “What does umm mean?”

“I umm…”

“You umm?”

“I might have made a mistake.”

“Tell me?”

“After we made the exchange, and Victoria was safely in the car, and the car was in gear, and we were driving off, I might have said something.”

“What might you have said?”

“I might have said something about seeing him real soon.”

“You used Scottie's name, didn't you?”

“Yeah.”

Harry grabbed the top of his head with both hands as if he were afraid it might fly off. “Yeah, I'd call that a mistake,” he said.

“I wasn't thinking.”

Yes, you were,
my inner voice told me.
You were thinking how clever you were.

“I'm sorry,” I said, only I wasn't sure whom I was apologizing to— Harry, Scottie, or Scottie's mother.

“We all make mistakes,” Harry said, which I thought was very generous of him. “If there's nothing else, you can go. In fact, I wish you would.”

I agreed and asked for a ride to my car. Harry nodded his head at the tech agent, and the agent fished in his pocket for his keys. We started down the sidewalk toward his vehicle. Harry called after me.

“McKenzie.”

“Yeah.”

“Don't ever point your finger at me again.”

 

The tech agent wanted to talk, but he seemed timid about it. I didn't give him an opening because I was still upset about Scottie. I was thinking that my careless remark might have cost him his life. While we were crossing the Mississippi River, going west on I-94 into Minneapolis, the agent finally said, “Your friends, Bobby and Shelby. I like them.”

“So do I.”

“They were very cool through all of this. Bobby got a little excited about Thomforde, I know, but other than that—I've been in on double-oh-sevens before.”

“Double-oh-sevens?” I said.

“All of the FBI's files relating to kidnappings begin with the numbers zero, zero, seven.”

You learn something new every day,
my inner voice said.

“Anyway, I've been on some cases where the family, the husband and wife, they blame each other, accuse each other. You can't imagine some of the things they say to each other. I appreciate that they're under a great deal of stress and emotions are near the surface, but you would think, you would hope, that it would bring them closer together instead of tearing them apart. The way they behave—it always reminds me of something that my father used to say when I was playing football. ‘Sports doesn't build character, it reveals character.' ”

“My father used to say the same thing,” I told him.

“Families facing a tragedy like this, a missing child, you learn about them in a hurry. What we learned about Bobby and Shelby, they're all right, they're going to be all right. I can only hope my wife and I, if something should happen to us, that we'll be”—he searched for a word, found one—“together.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Eighteen months.”

After that, he had plenty to say, mostly about his bride. He had fallen in love with her at first sight—apparently she was a combination of Joan of Arc, Madame Curie, and Scarlett Johansson. I didn't mind him going on about her. I liked that he was in love with his wife. Going by the divorce rates these days, it seems so few men are.

 

We took the Lyndale Avenue exit off I-94, drove west on Vineland Place, and eased onto Kenwood Parkway. The tech agent entered the Parade Stadium parking lot, swung his car in a wide arc, and parked directly in front of my Audi. I thanked him for the ride and got out. He waited until I could prove that I was good to go, which I thought was nice of him. I was opening my door when a desperate squeal of tires made me look toward the street. A dark blue Chevy Impala was entering the parking lot at high speed. It accelerated straight toward us, then turned abruptly, moving parallel to where we were parked, like a man o'-war about to deliver a broadside. The cannon—a handgun I couldn't identify—was held at arm's length outside the driver's side window.

“Down,” I shouted and crouched next to my Audi, the car between me and the Impala. Bullets were already flying. I heard two of them slam into the body of my car. Fortunately, they didn't go all the way through. Anyone who thinks a car will protect you in a gunfight watches too much television—they're mostly tin and fiberglass, after all. At least eight shots were fired before the Impala turned again and sped toward the parking lot exit, hit the street, and drove west at high speed.

I rose slowly from cover. My senses were supercharged with adrenaline—my eyes and ears were processing too much data, and I was having trouble sorting through it all. I continued to search for the car, to listen for its engine, but it was gone. Finally I pivoted toward the tech agent's vehicle. “Did you see that?” I asked.

The tech agent was sitting behind the steering wheel and speaking calmly into his handheld radio. “Officer down,” he said, not excited at all—he could have been ordering takeout.

Still,
officer down?

I rushed to his car. There was a bullet hole in the driver's side door. The agent was giving his position and status when I yanked the door open. His left hand was pressed hard against his upper thigh. Blood was spilling from between his fingers and soaking his trousers and the car seat. I gently lifted his hand off his thigh to examine the wound, only I couldn't see the bullet hole for the stream of blood that was pumping out of it. I returned his hand, knelt on the asphalt, and began removing the laces from my Nikes to use as a tourniquet. The agent didn't miss a beat, still speaking calmly as he described the car. “Late-model dark blue Chevrolet Impala, Minnesota plates, first two digits
G
as in George,
P
as in Peter, heading west on Kenwood Parkway when last seen.” I slid the shoelace around his leg and tied it above the wound. “We cannot pursue. Repeat, we cannot pursue. Dammit,” he added after he set the handheld on the seat next to him.